Posted by Adam_Kirur March 18, 2010
Well, it’s just about that time again: Congress will shortly be adjourning for the Easter break, going home to their districts, where they shall, as last August, be hearing from alleged “constituents” of theirs, people whom I confidently predict will have two words above all others on the tips of their well-prepared tongues and in the depths of their soon-to-be-freshly-hoarse throats.
Liberty.
Tyranny.
Fine antonyms, those. So fine, in fact, that more and more Tea Partiers, Town-Hollers [sic], Beckerheads and their pandering Republicans are tossing them about willy-nilly, using them in every other sentence as if newly-learned “Words for Today,” embracing them with such ardor as to constitute what I can only describe as a series of linguistic threeways.
Who’d have thunk that Michele Bachmann could be the Linda Lovelace of lexicological politics???
But those words, like so many others employed by the right, are code.
I’m recalling a scene from the movie Reds, wherein Jack Nicholson, playing a weary and increasingly-cynical Eugene O’Neill, says, “Ah, Russia. You know, whenever I hear some young, starry-eyed convert to The Cause talk about Russia, I can’t help but think to myself, ‘Watch out: A new version of Irish Catholicism is being offered for your consumption.’”
Well, that’s exactly how I feel whenever I see one of these astroturfed, out-of-district (and here I thought conservatives were against busing!) drones barking the L-word and/or T-word at their elected representatives. To my mind, it translates as, “Hi, I’m a gun-toting, climate change-denying, the-Bible-is-literally-true-even-the-self-contradictory-parts ‘Christian’ who simply cannot handle the fact that there’s a gosh-darn NEGRO in the White House!”
For, when one truly considers it, what other explanation can there be? I mean, where were these people?
Seriously, where WERE these people???
When George W. Bush was spending money like there was no tonight, let alone tomorrow, where were they?
When Dick Cheney was taking the laws of the country and waterboarding them to fit his own, twisted conceptions of “national security,” where were they?
When John Ashcroft was putting the Constitution into the shredder, where were they?
When Scooter Libby was committing TREASON, where were they?
When America was being led down the garden path to a wholly-unnecessary war in Iraq, the premises of which could be called laughably false but for the fact that the deaths of 4,000+ American troops and God-only-knows how many Iraqis really aren’t all that funny, where were they?
When, for eight years, on every aspect of foreign, military, domestic, fiscal, cultural, legal, and ethical issues these suddenly-”outraged” people were being lied to by their own government, WHERE WERE THEY?
I’ll tell you where they were: Sitting on their asses, watching the tube with other white guys, snacking on corn dogs and freedom fries as they watched the football game, while their wives and girlfriends were in another room having salad with liberty dressing, all of them contented and complacent in the God-given certainty that, in their country, everything was going just fine!